RIP Pimlico School
The wonderful Pimlico School, the Brutalist building by John Bancroft and the GLC architects, is finally to be demolished. Amazingly, the iconic and seminal building was given a certificate of immunity from being listed by the goverment a few years ago. It has numerous structural and environmental problems but it really is a superb piece of architecture and I only wish something could be done to save it and renovate it for another lifetime. The campus it creates, the sense of enclosure of the sunken playgrounds yet connection with the streetscape is fantastic. Go visit it now before it disappears.
Comments
I bought some of my first kitchen utensils in a fund-raising fete there when I left home. (I was with my sister, who taught me some boot sale bargaining techniques I still use today.)
I attended school there from 1977 to 1979. I still remember it like it was yesterday. Peter Redding
love it or hate it the Sixties Brutalist Architecture of Pimlico School in London screams out to be noticed. Its call to a shiny new vision of Comprehensive education where art ,drama, and music, can be celebrated, has grown a little tarnished,after decades of neglect at the hands of Westminster Council.
I believe many on the council hate both the Vision and the Architecture. Now it seams they may succeed in destroying both.
The Architecture Style is pretty strong stuff ,but its clarity is startling and sorely absent from the lacklustre proposal that Westminster is rushing through now. The Proposal goes before the planning committee on Thursday 13th December,with recommendations for it to be passed.
For the School to Be lumbered with such a travesty of poor design is criminal. The proposal part of the national Building Schools for the Future program(BSF) was kept secret until it went up for planning and has only had superficial consultation with any user groups.Its hardly supprissing that the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) has condemned it 'as not good enough' and that Lord Rogers has castigated it as a waste of money
Today truly great sixties architecture is being reassessed so is the Vision . The ,white heat of technology' is to be tempered by sustainability and respect for the environment.
Pimlico students deserve a revitalised vision of what enlighten education can bring and the new building must not be a by product of Westminster's hatred and BSF ' design and build' cost cutting ,it should embrace ,and confront, the challenges of today ,and should look to inspire by imaginative reuse of the existing building, however if school students are to watch the existing building be painstakingly crumbled grain by grain then let the new building be, something to be proud of.
So please express your opposition to the current Westminster Council building proposal while there is yet time .
Yours sincerely
Julian Cripps
I remember you from Plimlico days, Canadian? We used to hang out in a group. Was Claire Rees Our German tutor? Her hubby biology. Anyway, keep good Tania